Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

;
490 Hebrews IX. 2-5.
1842 vol. 9. p. 193), according to which, the author had in his mind,
and before his eye, the arrangements of that temple which the
Egyptian Jews, under Onias 150 B.C. built at Leontopolis. This
conjecture is the more untenable when we find that Onias built his
temple with great exactness after the pattern of that at J erusalem,
so that, at Leontopolis, the altar of incense assuredly stood nowhere
else than it did at Jerusalem.
Side by side with the first solution is to be placed also that of
Bleek, according to which, the altar of incense did really stand in
the holy place, but the author allowed himself to be led into the
mistake of placing it in the holy of holies by the passages Ex.
XXX. 6 and 26 ; Lev. iv. 7, seq. (where it is said the altar of incense
stands " over against the ark of the covenant").
This hypothesis is,
however, simply refuted by the 7th verse of our chapter, where the
author expressly and definitely says that the high priest entered
into the 6evTt:pa oKT]vrj only once in the year, which he could not have
said if, in his opinion, the daily ofiering of incense had been brought
into the holiest of all.
With this also is refuted a second hypothesis (which has been
put forth by Tholuck, only problematically, however, on the alleged
ground of 1 Kings \\. 22 ; Ex. xxvi. 35), that, in reality, the altar
of incense may have stood in the hol}^ of holies. We are not under
the necessity of having recourse to Ex. xxx. 6 (" thou shalt place
it before the vail") in order to prove, that the altar of incense really
stood in the holy place, and by no means in the holy of holies,* as
it clearly ai)pears from the 7th verse of our chapter that, in the
opinion too of our author, it stood in the holy place and not in the
holy of holies. The question, now, is no longer one of a contradiction
between our author and the Pentateuch, but of a kind of contradiction
into which he seems to have fallen with himself.
But how much the less conceivable such a contradiction of the
author with himself is, by so much the more might the third principal
solution seem, on a superficial view of the question, to recommend
itself, the solution, namely, of those (as the Peshito, Vulg.,
Theophylact, Luther, Calov, de Dieu, Reland, Deyling, J. G.
Michuelis, Bohme, Kuinoel, Stuart, Klee, etc.), who would translate
OvjuaTi'ipiov here by censer. That Ovjuari'ipiov may actually mean
censer is proved (from Thucyd. vi. 4G ; Diod. Sic. xiii. 3 ;
LXX.
Ex. viii. 11 ; 2 Chron. xxvi. 19; Joseph. Ant. iv. 2, 4). It has even
been maintained that it must be rendered here by censer ;
for the
altar of incense is never denoted in the LXX. by OvfuariipinVj but
* For the op|)Osito opinion it has been contended, that Origen also (horn. 8 in Exod.,
9 in Lovit.), Oilcumeniua and Augustine (qu. 177, in I'lxod.) assigned the altar of incense
to the holy of holies. But none of these three Fathers saw the temple themselves
they, all of them, drew their information solely from our passage, lleb. ix. 4,
testimony here is entirely without weight.
so that their